This has been a rough week at our house. We discovered that two of us are allergic to dairy and one of the children is allergic to wheat gluten.
At first, we were in shock. How is this possible? What are we going to eat? With our current supply of food in the cupboards, it was next to impossible for our child with wheat allergies to find anything to eat. And, if we ate the food ourselves, we saw the sadness wash over her face. It wasn’t fair.
So, we set out to make it fair. We went on a rampage, and cleared everything off the shelves, reading each ingredient on every package. Then, we put all of the food that contained gluten or wheat in shopping bags and donated them to a local food donation site. It was simply shocking to see how much we ended up giving away – breakfast cereals, pasta, couscous, soups, sauces, and the list goes on. Moving on to the freezer, fish sticks, chicken nuggets, burritos, waffles – it didn’t seem possible that our whole freezer was stocked with food that had wheat or dairy.
Next, we went shopping. There are signs up at Trader Joe’s for Gluten Free products, so I started there. Huge kudos to Trader Joe’s, because they gave my family the V.I.P. tour. They offered to open any package to let my daughter try anything she wanted, and whatever we didn’t buy was transferred over to the samples station. After about ten minutes of this, we started to think, “Maybe we can handle this after all.”
Fast forward to last night at dinner. We didn’t give the freezer food away (yet), and messed up and ate some in front of our daughter. This weekend, we’ll give it to a friend so that doesn’t happen again. But, she was so sad, I had to make it up to her. So I did. I made home made gluten free chicken nuggets.
Here are the ingredients for my thrown-together Gluten Free Chicken Nuggets:
- 1 chicken breast, cut into chunks (nuggets)
- 2 rice cakes, pulverized in a blender with a really strong motor
- 1 Tbsp garlic powder, mixed into the rice cakes
- 1 beaten egg
- 2 cups canola oil (I didn’t measure, it could’ve been 1 1/2, use your judgement)
- salt to taste (we didn’t use any salt, so they were a bit bland)
- ketchup for dipping
How I Made Gluten Free Chicken Nuggets
There is a show on the Food Network called “Chopped.” It’s an insane show where professional chefs are given ingredients that have nothing to do with each other, and they are expected to make something delicious. Taking a cue from the Chopped Chefs, I took two rice cakes and put them in the blender until it looked like flour. I have a Vitamix blender, and a weaker blender might not have been able to do this. But, you could always put the rice cakes in a plastic bag and hit it with a hammer a bunch of times. (Yes, that’s the technical name of the technique: hit it with a hammer a bunch of times.)
Then, I added some garlic powder. I heated up some canola oil, and cut up a chicken breast into nuggets. I dipped the chicken into a beaten egg, then dredged it in the pulverized rice cakes powder. The chicken took about 5 minutes on each side to finish frying. Voila, home made gluten free chicken nuggets!
The side items are a breakfast hash brown cut in half and some peas. You have to really watch the ingredients on potato products, because many of them are dredged in wheat flour before they are fried.
My daughter said she really liked the dish. She said we’ll be spending a lot less time and money at restaurants as a result of this food allergy, and we’ll be saving money by only paying for ingredients. She’s right.
If you try the recipe, let me know what you think. And yes, I know this isn’t the healthiest dinner ever created, but sometimes you just have to make it work.
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